The organisers of the Big Tent Festival have confirmed that it has been wound up after it became ‘too successful’.
In a statement posted on the festival’s Facebook site, organisers have said: “There will be no Big Tent Festival in 2014 or in the foreseeable future.
“The organisers Falkland Centre for Stewardship are focusing on a series of events and activities that will unfold across the year. We will keep you posted…”
The Big Tent Festival, held on Falkland Estate since 2006 and eventually attracting 11,000 people, was launched by the Falkland Centre of Stewardship in response to the staging of the G8 summit at Gleneagles.
Organisers say it was becoming increasingly difficult to stage the event billed as ‘Scotland’s greenest festival’ and raise enough money due to its scale and popularity.
Usually held in the last weekend of July, it started as a small-scale venture but grew attracting acts in recent years including The Proclaimers, King Creosote and Rosanne Cash whose family have historic roots in the Falkland area.
But the event last held in 2012 had been postponed while a major review was carried out.
Live music was central to the festival but the family-friendly event also included cycling, walking, storytelling, arts and crafts and local food and drink showcases.
The charity which ran the festival and attracted funding from Fife Council and EventScotland now wants to concentrate on smaller events it runs the rest of the year.
Ninian Crichton Stuart, chairman of Falkland Estate Trust and estate steward at the Falkland Centre for Stewardship, has denied that level of competition had triggered the decision to wind up the Big Tent.
He said the event was still very much about looking at what people in Scoland can do about environmental issues and how we live our lives. He said the amount of work involved in organising the event as it grew and the challenge raising the funds to meet all the costs involved were huge.
He said only a couple of thousand people attended the first event compared with more than 11,000 in 2012.
He said they were a “very modest-sized organisation” and the event had grown “very big, very quickly” to the extent that it took up most of the year to organise.
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